In 1939, Kallir founded Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which became instrumental in establishing Austrian Expressionism in America. Kallir\u2019s granddaughter Jane Kallir took over the gallery with Kallir\u2019s business partner, Hildegard Bachert, after Kallir\u2019s death in 1978, and ran it for 40 years before launching the Kallir Research Institute.<\/p>\n
Austrian Expressionists, including masters like Klimt and Schiele, \u201chad no reputation outside of Austria then,\u201d Jane Kallir told The Times, adding that Kallir built them up \u201cby collaborating with museums and donating to museums.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Kallir died and Jane Kallir surveyed the work he left behind, she began thinking that if finances allowed, she\u2019d like to one day complete her grandfather\u2019s mission. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cSelf Portrait With Brown Background\u201d by Egon Schiele, 1912.<\/p>\n
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)<\/p>\n
In recent years, she happily realized she would be able to do just that. The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane Kallir said there weren\u2019t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism. For this reason, it soon became clear that LACMA was the answer, alongside the Getty Research Institute, which will also receive a selection of rare Viennese books, portfolios and prints that Kallir published.<\/p>\n
A significant portion of the Kallir gift is composed of works on paper, which will be housed at LACMA\u2019s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies under the care of curator Timothy O. Benson. Benson is curating a show featuring 24 works from the gift, titled \u201cAustrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,\u201d which will open Nov. 23 and run through May 31, 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cGerman Expressionism has always been something of an outlier in terms of American museum exhibition and collecting priorities,\u201d Jane Kallir said. \u201cAnd honestly, when I think about it, there is no institution in the United States that is the equal to LACMA in terms of the groundbreaking scholarship it\u2019s done in this field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quite a bit of that scholarship has been done by Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of modern art at LACMA, who has spent decades building her knowledge in the field by contributing to arts periodicals and books as well as staging exhibitions, including \u201cGerman Expressionist Sculpture\u201d (1982), \u201cDegenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany\u201d (1991), \u201cExiles + \u00c9migr\u00e9s: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler\u201d (1997) and \u201cNew Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919\u20131933\u201d (2015), among others.<\/p>\n
Barron noted that L.A. has a long history of attracting accomplished Viennese emigres, including Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. In the late 1930s and \u201940s, a new wave of artists, actors, writers and thinkers who were fleeing the Nazis helped seed a thriving Austrian community in Southern California.<\/p>\n
LACMA\u2019s strength up until now, however, was German Expressionism, Barron said, adding that the museum\u2019s collection of Austrian Expressionism was weak.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a lacuna, and it\u2019s been something that I really never thought we\u2019d have a prayer of fixing,\u201d said Barron. \u201cSo just to be able to have Klimt and Schiele paintings for the collection, to enhance our Expressionist holdings, is something that\u2019s been a longtime dream of mine. I am deeply grateful for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The work will be crated and shipped in waves. The first group contains an exquisite 1897 Klimt portrait, titled \u201cWoman With Fur Collar,\u201d that Barron described as \u201csmall but mighty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also of note: two Schiele landscapes that Jane Kallir called \u201cblockbusters.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cSawmill\u201d by Egon Schiele, 1913.<\/p>\n
(Kallir Research Institute, New York)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are both seminal works from a key period in the artist\u2019s life,\u201d Jane Kallir said. \u201cThey\u2019re large, they\u2019re fabulous. The paintings are going to be complemented by at least nine or 10 works on paper. And Schiele is an artist who was also known for his watercolors and drawings.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn one fell swoop, Los Angeles becomes a center for Schiele studies,\u201d Jane Kallir said.
Elevating and studying Schiele is something that occupied both Jane Kallir and her grandfather over the course of their professional careers, she said.<\/p>\n
When Kallir fled the Nazis in 1938, immediately after the annexation of Austria, he had no problem taking Schiele paintings, watercolors and drawings out of Austria \u201cbecause the Nazis considered Schiele degenerate,\u201d Jane Kallir said. The artist also had no international value. This became a problem once Kallir got to New York because he couldn\u2019t sell anything. <\/p>\n
Kallir held Schiele\u2019s first one-person show in the U.S. in 1941. \u201cDrawings were priced at $20 each. Watercolors were priced at $60 each. And he did not sell a single one. He sold one painting \u2014 a very small painting \u2014 for $250, and the guy who bought it paid out the $250 in $13 monthly installments over a period of two years.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s really amazing, Jane Kallir said, to compare that moment to Schiele\u2019s reputation today. Fortunately for Angelenos, some of that work will soon be on view. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 100 works of Austrian Expressionism worth \u201cwell over\u201d $60 million are being gifted to Los Angeles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[18890,365,362,363,364,6929,68424,366,23582,18,117,68425,68426,19,17,68420,28652,13516,68419,68421,68422,68423,68427,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-109893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-austria","14":"tag-austrian-expressionism","15":"tag-design","16":"tag-drawing","17":"tag-eire","18":"tag-entertainment","19":"tag-first-klimt","20":"tag-gift","21":"tag-ie","22":"tag-ireland","23":"tag-jane","24":"tag-lacma","25":"tag-museum","26":"tag-otto-kallir","27":"tag-schiele-art","28":"tag-schiele-painting","29":"tag-stephanie-barron","30":"tag-watercolor","31":"tag-work"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}